Thursday, August 29, 2013

How to Quickly isolate and remove a problematic WebPart

Here's a nice tip of the day, for anyone wanting to solve those annoying WebPart exception issues.

A lot of times, when you start tweaking with WebParts, you can end up breaking the whole page unexpectedly. To quickly resolve this issue, one thing you can do is close the offending WebPart.

To do this, you can simply add a special query string parameter called "contents" and set it to "1".
For example: (...)
For instance, when you access a faulty page like http://www.get-sp.com/foobar.aspx, you might get a message like "Sorry, something went wrong" with not much more information on the particular issue:

If you have permissions to Edit the page, you'll be able to see something like the above, listing all WebParts in the page. In this view, you're able to "Close" (and/or "Delete") any WebParts that you suspect might be breaking the page, and then go back to the page.

Note that you can always re-add a "Closed" WebPart by editing the page and clicking "Add new WebPart" > "Closed WebParts section".